Take the Geek Time Trip to…The Jungle Book

Take the Geek Time Trip to…The Jungle Book

The latest version of The Jungle Book, a mixed live action/CGI (Computer Generated Images) version from Disney with a voice cast including Bill Murray as Baloo, Scarlett Johansson as Kaa, Idris Elba as Shere Khan, and Christopher Walken as King Louie, opens in the USA (and Canada, China, the UK, and others) tomorrow.

Of course, it all goes back to a book. 🙂

It’s a long road back to the 1894 release of the original book by Rudyard Kipling…a Disney musical animated movie, an anime, a sequel by Kipling, a non-Kipling sequel, videogames, and more.

The History Project is in a growth phase. They’ve been getting more funding and more partners…for example, the AP (Associated Press) recently partnered with THP.

TMCGTT is also just starting. I’ve been “retrofitting” early entries I did to make them a lot more useful. I’m happy with what I’ve done, although there is a lot more to do (and there will always be more). I’m looking forward to future features from THP, especially in the area of collaboration. Even though that’s the case, I’d be happy to get a collaborator or two at this point. If you are interested, let me know.

I bring that up because one of the things they don’t have at this point is a global searchbox. You can’t go to THP and just search for all of the references to “The Jungle Book”. I’m sure that will come in the future, though.

It currently defaults to “Memories”…click or tap “Timeline”. I can understand why people like seeing the images first, but the Timeline is a much simpler view, and therefore, easier to search

I think you’ll find it easiest if you click or tap “Show All Events”, but you can also just navigate to 1894. When you find “The Jungle Book published >”, click or tap on it

The “>” is my symbol to tell you that there is content you can get to easily in that entry. In this case, it’s a book you can read. In other cases, it might be a movie you can watch, a radio show to which you can listen, and (I haven’t actually done one of these yet) a videogame you can play.

I only put the symbol there if there is a free version available through a link in the entry that does not require a membership.

When you get to The Jungle Book, you’ll also see an image of the original cover. As regular readers know, I’m quite careful about copyright. I make an effort to find out if an image is in the public domain (not under copyright protection) before I put it in TMCGTT. If I’m really not sure, you’ll see a placeholder image instead…text I format.

You’ll generally see a location in entries. Those also appear on a map on the “all events” view.

Next, you’ll see a description. This is what’s there so far for The Jungle Book (reformatted to work in this blog):

* sequels
** The Second Jungle Book
** Just So Stories
** The Third Jungle Book (not by Kipling)
* movies
** 1942 with Sabu
** 1967 Disney animated version
** 1994 Disney live version with Jason Scott Lee
** 2016 Disney live action/CGI version with all star voice cast
** 2018 Andy Serkis version
* comics
* anime

===

There certainly could be more information about The Jungle Book, but that’s a lot!

The order of the links goes roughly like this:

First, the most easily accessible ways to get to the content itself. I don’t, by the way, link simply to a place to buy something. For books, I do link to Goodreads which in turn has the links, but TMCGTT is not a direct money-making project for me.

Generally, for books in the public domain, I start with ManyBooks.net. On a computer (including most tables), you can read the book online. You can also download the book, then send it/transfer it to your Kindle. This is in the USA…there may not be a free version where you live.

I like the ManyBooks interface..I think it’s easy to use and well thought out.

In the case, the book is also available at Archive.org.

Next level? Searching public libraries. You probably need a library card, but you may have one already. 🙂

As we get down to references (as opposed to the book itself), the flow tends to be from more specific (where there will be fewer entries, probably) to more general. The ISFDB is the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. That’s more specific than Goodreads, which is more specific than Wikipedia.

You probably know most of these. I was surprised at how much book-related content YouTube has…there may be book reviews, for one thing, and audiobooks (which may also be available at Archive.org). The Twitter search tends to find pictures of book covers, which is cool. 🙂 I think it may be people selling the copies…and that likely falls under Fair Use.

You might not know Wikia…anybody can start a Wiki there, and they tend to be pretty fan-focused.

Since a new movie is about to be released, much of what you find may relate to that movie…but I do try to narrow it down.

In the future, I would want to add entries for each of the movies and each of the book sequels. That’s where collaborators could come in handy, in addition to them contributing their own items I haven’t entered yet.

Those would be connected through “tags”, which are also on this page. There is a “tag cloud” on the All Events view.

Tags for The Jungle Book include right now:

literature

short stories

Rudyard Kipling

The Jungle Book

talking animals

ferals

Most of those are practical. I like finding odder trends (for one thing, in the early Twentieth Century, there were a number of stories about “bodiless heads”…living heads which don’t have, and may never have had, a body (which is why they are “bodiless” rather than “disembodied).

Ferals (humans, generally, that have “gone wild”) include not only Mowgi, but Tarzan, of course. There are significant differences, but the similarities are clear. So, did The Jungle Book inspire Tarzan, or did Tarzan inspire The Jungle Book? Which came first…the Lord of the Apes or the Man Cub? As you’ll be able to see from the timeline, it’s The Jungle Book…which is part of why the timeline part is fun and enlightening.

There you go! I hope that helps explain The Measured Circle’s Geek Time Trip more…and since I ported the links over to this post, you don’t even need to go there this time to start reading The Jungle Book now.

If you have any questions or comments for me and my readers about TMCGTT, feel free to comment on this post. If you do go to The History Project, I think it would help for you to share your experience and your ideas with them at

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